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At Forbes, we talk to a lot of billionaires about how they make, spend and give away their money. There’s a particular species of billionaire who uses a chunk of their fortune seeking adventure and exploration. Think of Richard Branson and his record-setting Morocco-to-Hawaii hot-air balloon ride, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos' deep-sea expedition to recover the engines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen lent his 414-foot yacht the Octopus in a failed mission last summer to raise the bell from HMS Hood, sunk by the Germans in World War II.

None of these superwealthy adventurers hold a wind-proof candle to Frederik Paulsen, Jr. I got an email last week offering the rare opportunity to meet Paulsen. He hardly ever talks to the press. I had never heard of him, but I said yes immediately because the email mentioned in passing that he was a billionaire and has never appeared on Forbes’ rich list or any other global wealth ranking. I came away from the meeting with huge respect for the man, not for his business acumen but for his ability to leave business behind and push himself to extremes in search of new knowledge and adventure.

Frederik Paulsen at the South Pole

Paulsen, a tall, slim 62-year-old Swede who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, was in New York to pick up an honorary directorship from the Explorers Club, whose annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria serves outrageously exotic hors d’oeuvres. This year’s party had goat’s eye martinis, pickled bull penis and hissing Madagascar cockroaches. Paulsen is a club member in excellent standing: In January he finished a 13-year quest to become the first human to tour all eight of the Earth’s poles. The most elaborate leg of the eight trips was in August 2007 when Paulsen rode inside one of two bathyscapes 14,196 feet to the floor of the Arctic Ocean to touch the “true” North Pole. He says he made a “major contribution” to fund the private mission's $2 million budget. The untethered subs explored a seabed no human eyes had ever observed for three hours before making the five-and-a-half hour ascent back to the ice hole they had entered. Paulsen laughs about it now, but his sub lost contact with the surface for 90 minutes during the ascent. “People told me it was impossible,” he says. “But I like a challenge. Challenges are good.”

Paulsen appeared the day after the dinner, exiting an elevator at the Waldorf without entourage or fuss, dressed in a business suit even on a Sunday. He has amassed an estimated $5 billion fortune building Ferring Pharmaceuticals of Switzerland, the privately held specialty biotech drugmaker his father started sixty years ago. He stepped back from running the company a few years ago, and spends most of his time and virtually all of his Ferring profits planning expeditions and underwriting philanthropic projects that are, literally, all over the map. “I worked my tail off for 30 years. I think I’ve done my time,” he says.

He’s spent close to $10 million on a rat-eradication project in South Georgia, a remote island (pop. 30) hundreds of miles off southeast of the Falklands, that uses helicopter-mounted machines to sprinkle blood-thinning poison across farms and fields. Every two years he builds a fertility clinic in a Russia city to help reverse its drastic population decline. He gave the kingdom of Bhutan more than $3 million and a big collection of tapestries to bolster its new Royal Textile Academy.

But when it comes to adventure, Paulsen outdoes Branson, Bezos and Allen. He and his network of French, Swiss, Australian and Russian scientists and explorers organize three or four adventure trips a year, some of them longer than 40 days at a time. In 2011 he attempted a summit of Ecuador’s Mt. Chimborazo to plant the Explorers Club flag atop the farthest point from the center of the Earth. He was the first to cross the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia in an ultralight aircraft, basically a lawn chair attached to a kite and propeller. At one point a gust turned him and the pilot sideways for hundreds of feet.

“I’ve always been fascinated with going to the North,” says Paulsen. "I'm from the North." His small leather agenda, which he orders custom each year, has the days and months written in Frisian, the language of his father’s ancestors from Fohr, an island on Germany’s North Sea coast near Denmark. Ferring, the name of the family business, is Frisian for the natives of the island.

Inside the sub on the Arctic sea floor (2007)

Paulsen’s fortune derives from the work of his father, a German physician who moved to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Paulsen, Sr. started drugmaker Ferring Pharmaceuticals in 1950 from a two-room research lab in Malmo. He was one of the first to synthesize essential human hormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin, both now commonly used drugs.

Paulsen, Jr., who was born the same year his father started the business, left home to get an undergraduate chemistry degree from Germany and returned for an MBA from Sweden’s University of Lund. He went to work for his father at 26, became managing director when the company moved to Switzerland in 1983 and rose to CEO five years later.

At the time, Ferring was doing $15 million in revenue. Paulsen, Jr. took the company global, riding a few hits in the 1990s that continue to generate decent profits. Revenue is today north of $1.6 billion. Ferring is building a $130 million manufacturing plant in Parsippany, N.J. “If you want to grow to be a $1 billion company in the U.S., as we do, you need to produce here,” says Paulsen. “We spent 17 years before we made any money in America.”

Paulsen and pilot before the ultralight crossing of the Bering Strait

Paulsen owns the company outright and it has virtually no debt. Forbes pegs the value of the privately held business at around $4 billion, based on the market-value-to-sales multiples of comparable public companies such as Cubist Pharmaceuticals and Astellas Pharma, as well as the median multiple for specialty biotech companies tracked by Capital IQ. Paulsen has almost certainly pocketed hundreds of millions of dividends over the years, but those cannot be confirmed, but he does say his side businesses in diagnostics and polypeptide manufacturing, as well as an offshore investment holding company, are together worth another 15% of Ferring’s value, pegging his wealth close to $5 billion.

Paulsen's next expedition is a scientific journey this summer, in which he and a handful of pilots will fly two ultralights equipped with lasers from Switzerland’s Lake Geneva to Siberia’s Lake Baikal, a 4,500-mile trip with 17 stops along the way to measure the biome over each lake and the levels of atmospheric carbon in between.

I hope to be tagging along for a story for Forbes Life magazine. Paulsen suspects that the atmospheric impact of Siberia’s forest fires is not integrated into global climate models. The two aircraft will use LIDAR to get accurate readings of the biome over both lakes as well as the air along the flight path at two different altitudes. “We think Russia has a worse environmental problem than acknowledged,” he says. As Malcolm Forbes, another adventurer, was fond of saying, “With all thy getting, get understanding.” No one epitomizes that idea more than Frederik Paulsen.